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He is a photographer without a camera. David Bergé takes people in tow and shows them a city, from scene to scene. Make your acquaintance with his AalstWalk.David Bergé (b. 1983) wants to participate in the art of photography without accepting the seductive and classic characteristics of the medium. As a result, a little over a year ago, the Belgian left his studio behind and reduced his possessions to the size of a suitcase in order to become a ‘professional tourist’. Each project is an incentive to depart for yet another place. In the framework of his residency at Netwerk this spring, together with the Austrian artist Jack Hauser, he organized walks through Aalst – something that he has also done elsewhere in Europe over the last few years. An AalstWalk, as this crossing of genres and activities is called, begins as follows. The participants (in groups of ten or fewer) are collected at a platform at the train station. Their guide (David Bergé or Jack Hauser) says to them, ‘Welcome to this AalstWalk. I will be your guide for the next 90 minutes. I would like to ask you to switch off your mobile phones and remain silent for the entire duration of the walk. Any questions before we leave?’ If there are none, the walks begins.The walkers’ frame of reference changes repeatedly over the course of the next hour and a half – and it is this shift in how people look at their surroundings that makes this project such a rare experience. Their first point of view is artistic: because the AalstWalk is organized by a contemporary art centre, the walker is expecting art, artifice, excitement, fiction. The streets of Aalst are subjected to the gentle paranoia that characterizes every exhibition or museum visit. We must be alert, attentive, search for meanings, aesthetics, indications and intentions. This walk is after all a work of art, and it is expected of us that we expect something. The first stop in this AalstWalk lives up to that expectation, in part. David Bergé leads a small group into the Station Hotel: a slightly aged establishment ‘with character’, in which all of the doors of the hotel rooms are open. Are there no guests? Only one room is locked. The guide has the key and shows the evidence of temporary habitation: an unmade bed, articles of clothing, a suitcase and a few books. Is this Bergé’s own room? Or is this the first scene of a crime story or a romance?That trail is not followed through. AalstWalk turns out not to be telling a story. Instead, it opens possibilities for taking mental photographs of the city and of the world. As the walk progresses, and in fact becomes duller (or more tiring), one’s artistic point of view changes into the attitude of a tourist, for we are now looking at Aalst because it is apparently indeed ‘real’, and because here we can see things from reality, which we can take home with us as images. Bergé stops, for example, in a parking garage – a concrete lookout platform, the roof of a factory building, offering views out over the city. Equally, a quarter of an hour later, the walk stops off in a residential neighbourhood that – Louis Paul Boon is off course not very far away – comes to a dead end, against a massive industrial park with smoking chimneys cut out against a blue sky. An old woman with a cane limps slowly towards us, not understanding what we are doing here. Do we understand it ourselves? Perhaps we have grown bored by the tourist perspective, and that now becomes a photographic one: after all, something ultimately exists only when it has been photographed. Yet no one takes out a camera or an iPhone…In the end, the artistic, the touristic and the photographic approaches all become absorbed into another single, more embracing way of looking at things – the attitude of the wanderer. In the literature of the world, the walk is of course a recurring theme. W.G. Sebald is classic, and recently, the American Teju Cole wrote his ‘wanderer novel’, Open City. Back in 1917, Robert Walser published his story Der Spaziergang, which could comfortably be read alongside the walks of David Bergé. Walser wrote, ‘There is always something remarkable accompanying the wanderer, something to think about, something fantastic, and it would be stupid of him not to take note of this spiritual side, or to reject it; on the contrary, he welcomes all the peculiar and exceptional phenomena, becomes their friend and their brother, because they give him pleasure. He makes fully formed and substantial bodies of them, gives them structure and soul, just as they in their turn lead him and inspire him.’Christophe Van Gerrewey is a writer and scientific researcher (FWO) at Ghent University